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The University of Pennsylvania's Matt Blaze (previously) is a legendary figure in cryptography and security circles; most recently he convened Defcon's Vote Hacking Village where security experts with no particular knowledge of voting machines repeatedly, fatally hacked surplus voting machines of the sort routinely used in US elections.
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When Massachusetts GOP Senator Scott Brown was elected in a 2010 special election, Senate Democrats agreed to delay a key vote on health care reform until he could be seated, so that the vote would be held by elected officials, not the appointed lame duck who was sitting in the seat that Brown was about to occupy.
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Someone is shopping a password-protected PDF of a forged lawsuit against Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to the DC press; the forgery attempts to trick journalists into thinking that Schumer is being sued by a female former staffer for sexual harassment.
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Yesterday, the DNC's Unity Reform Commission unanimously adopted a resolution that slashed the number of superdelegates -- appointed officials who, in aggregate, hold the balance that determines the winner of the Democratic primaries -- from 715 to 315, and requiring the remaining superdelegates to cast votes that reflect the wishes of their states.
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Vice reporter Eve Peyser spent a weekend on the road with Bernie Sanders, and writes vividly and charmingly about the personal habits and behind-the-scenes homeliness of the famously non-materialistic, idealistic senator.
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Back in the days of the Howard Dean campaign, it seemed that the political left had a near-monopoly on brilliant, technologically sophisticated "netroots" activists, a situation that carried over to the Obama campaigns. But by 2016, the Pepe-slinging alt-right showed that earlier right-wing cybermilitias weren't just warmed over jokes with an unhealthy appreciation for Conservapedia -- they, too, could fight effectively by forming decentralized open source insurgencies that allowed autonomous activists and groups to change the political landscape.
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Multiple White House sources have told reporters that the Trump administration has been negotiating with Erik Prince (founder of the war-crimes plagued mercenary firm Blackwater; brother to pyramid-scheme billionaire/Education Secretary Betsy Devos) and ex-CIA operative John R. Maguire to assemble a private army of deniable, off-the-books spy/mercenaries who could target Trump's "deep state" political enemies in the USA, and kidnap and render similar figures overseas.
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A toxic mix of voter suppression and dark money infusions has allowed Republicans to seize power at the state level across America, producing a series of living labs where their ideology has been allowed to play out with disastrous consequences.
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During Roy Moore's judicial bouts -- punctuated by frequent removals from the bench for gross misconduct -- he was part of the mass incarceration wave in America, which has resulted in millions of black people being thrown in prison on flimsy pretenses for long sentences, while whites in similar situations have gone free.
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The Republican Party has always struggled to attract woman voters, but the triumph of admitted rapist Donald Trump and the party's backing of child-molester Roy Moore, the Dominionist misogyny of Mike Pence, and the painfully obvious hatred of women from the Grand Old Patriarchs has galvanized opposition to the Republicans from women who historically voted without much thought about gender issues: independents, reluctant Democrats, college-educated affluent white women, and other women whom the GOP relied on for votes, or at least indifference.
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Bernie Sanders writes in Politico in advance of the publication of the report of the Democratic Party's Unity Reform Commission -- set up jointly by Sanders and Clinton -- and sets out a trio of modest, vital reforms that will make the party more accountable to voters and less susceptible to corruption.
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A pair of economists analyzed data aggregated from smartphone tracking apps to see how long Americans spent at Thanksgiving dinner and how far they traveled to get there, and compared it to precinct-level voting data and data on the intensity of election advertising spending targeted to the subjects, and concluded that "Cell-tracking shows that mixed-party families had shorter 2016 Thanksgivings, an effect exacerbated by political advertising."
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The telcoms industry has aggressively lobbied state legislatures to pass laws banning cities from setting up their own internet infrastructure, even in places where there is no broadband, exacerbating the high prices and poor service that Americans pay for their internet.
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Senator Rand Paul, architect of some of the most extreme policies of the Republican Party, had five of his ribs fractured (three were "displacement fractures") and suffered lung bruising after being beaten at his Kentucky home; his next-door neighbor, Rene Boucher (59), an anesthesiologist/inventor who is thought to have worked at a nearby hospital with Rand Paul, was arrested and bailed for fourth-degree assault.
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